He dumped the food onto the kitchen counter and turned on the radio. He needed human voices near; what they were saying wasn’t relevant. He went to the pantry to put the tins away and glanced at his reflection in an oval mirror Ida had bought at auction. She’d hung the mirror from a nail on the back of the pantry door so she could do a quick check on hair and lipstick without having to leave the kitchen, especially when they were expecting company.

The person he saw was a tall man with shadows under his eyes, a blotch on his left cheek where a menacing-looking mole had been removed several months earlier, a thick head of white hair, glasses that needed cleaning. For a moment, he thought his Nova Scotia grandfather was staring back—Grampa William Murray. It was Grampa Murray who had taught him that fishing season didn’t officially start until the alder leaf was the size of a mouse’s ear. It was Grampa Murray who’d walked him around the boundaries of the farm so they could keep watch over fences, fields and soil conditions. When they arrived at two apple trees at the far end of the property line, Tom was told to check the fruit for size and ripeness. If an apple was picked, his grampa took a salt shaker from his shirt pocket because you’d never eat an apple without sprinkling a bit of salt on the tart flesh after the first bite.

His grampa also tried to teach him to shoot, but Tom didn’t want to hunt animals. He wondered what his late grandfather would have thought of the news report earlier this year about a goose that had fallen from the sky after being shot. The dead goose dropped plumb down, directly onto a hunter’s head. A bizarre story. The hunter was severely injured, and he wasn’t even the one who’d shot that particular goose. Maybe Grampa Murray, if he were alive, would have drawn a moral from the tale; he had often read Aesop’s fables aloud during those summer visits after the war. In his will, he left Tom a beloved book of poetry called The Casquet of Gems, published in Edinburgh in 1885. The final poem in the book was by Robert Pollok, a man whom Grampa Murray had spoken about sadly because Pollok died before reaching his thirtieth birthday. The poem was about Byron, part of a longer work titled The Course of Time. Because of this verse by Pollok, Tom had, in turn, come to admire the work of Byron.

He touched his harp, and nations heard, entranced.

As some vast river of unfailing source,

Rapid, exhaustless, deep, his numbers flowed,

And oped new fountains in the human heart.

Tom loved the line “And oped new fountains in the human heart.” He had grown up without a father, but he’d never stopped wishing for one. Every moment he spent with his grandparents was special. On arrival in Nova Scotia, he attached himself to his grampa’s side. In 1945, when he was six years old, he’d met his father, once, but that was a separate memory. One he could recall in intimate detail but didn’t indulge often, and wouldn’t now.